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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
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Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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A single breaker may recede but the tide is evidently coming in.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action it inspires no enthusiasm it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
Thomas B. Macaulay